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Friday, September 23, 2016

Review vs. Reaction

Again, before I start off with my first actual review/reaction post, here's another preamble of sorts. =P

You may notice from my two previous posts here and here, that I use the term recap/review (or sometimes reaction) for the posts I am planning to make.

I always call them 'recap/review' instead of just 'review' because I am aware of movie reviews out there that are meant to be read by people who haven't seen a movie, and used by them to help decide whether they want to see the movie or not. Of course, such reviews are expected not to reveal certain details about the movie such as the ending or significant plot twists. And so, I call my works 'recap/reviews' or 'reactions' (and they usually come with spoiler warnings) to make it clear that they contain a recap of the things that happened in the movie or tv show episode.

But notice that I'm now referring to it as a review/reaction (see above). =P

You see, I have asked some people what their expectations of a movie review are. Most of them have said that they think movie reviews are meant the way I described them above - to help potential viewers decide whether they want to watch a movie or not.
Personally, however, I read reviews after I have seen the movie. This is because my main purpose usually is to find out if other people reacted to the movie the same way I did. =)

And so, my plan is now this:

For movies, particularly, I will be writing review/reactions. This will be a two part post. The first part will be a relatively spoiler-free review that is targeted towards people who haven't seen the movie. The second part will be a spoiler-filled reaction targeted towards people who have already seen the movie. Whether these two parts will be posted separately, I am not yet sure. Most likely, they will be contained in the same post, separated by a very conspicuous SPOILER ALERT! warning before the reaction part.

For tv show episodes, I will probably just be writing reactions as usual. That means spoiler-filled!

As for books, I am not yet sure how I'm going to go about writing about books. Maybe, if I decide to write chapter-by-chapter book posts, those will be purely reactions (spoiler-filled). But if I decide to make a post about a book in general, it might be a relatively spoiler-free review. Or perhaps it would be best if I just continue writing about specific elements in books like I did before. For instance, focused on Snape here, and focused on the Time-Turner here. We'll see. =)